Flight of the Raven (11 page)

The boy waited patiently behind several patrons buying cold drinks. When he reached the front of the line, he fished in his pocket for the crumpled envelope and laid it on the counter. The white-jacketed attendant whisked it out of sight and handed the boy a second thousand-peseta note and an ice-cream bar. For a moment they looked at each other. Then the attendant shrugged, and the boy turned away and began to unwrap his confection. It was an unexpected bonus.

Half an hour later, a teenage girl dressed in jeans and sandals showed up and asked the ice-cream man if he could tell her what time the cathedral in Toledo closed for the afternoon. He gave her the correct answer and the envelope. Had it been unsealed, he might have satisfied his curiosity about the contents. But if he looked inside, he had no way of returning the package to its original condition. Since he suspected he was acting as a go-between in some underworld payoff, he refrained from meddling. Taking good money to hold a small envelope for part of the afternoon was one thing. Incurring the displeasure of whoever had purchased his services was quite another.

The girl, who took the envelope from the café, delivered it to a leather repair shop off the Gran Via, where it was picked up by the Raven, along with the pair of shoes he’d left to be resoled. Before heading home, he stopped at the specialty food department of El Corte Inglés and bought a bag of the freshly ground Columbian coffee he’d grown fond of.

There was a certain risk, he acknowledged, as he waited for the elevator to descend from the fourth floor of his apartment building, in relying on such a circuitous delivery route. But he had weighed that risk against the more obvious danger of returning to the Prado.

Not until he had double-locked the door to his apartment did he remove the crumpled envelope from his breast pocket. Inside was a folded sheet of paper with a message typed in English. It specified an emergency evening meeting for the next Thursday at Café Sabatini in the old quarter of town. Though the message looked as though it could have come from Eisenberg’s replacement, he knew it wasn’t from one of the Falcon’s agents. The headers and trailers that bracketed the message were similar to what he had expected but the validation sequence was missing. Peregrine agents didn’t make mistakes like that, which meant the message was forged.

Chyort!
How in the devil had Bogolubov found out about the dead drop? Either it was horrible luck or the comrade general was a lot craftier than he’d thought. Either way, the noose around his neck was drawing tighter. The urgent request for a meeting was a trap.

* * *

T
HE ATMOSPHERE
of tension in the Aviary was so heavy that Gordon’s beloved parrots were squawking like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Constance McGuire closed the door to the concealed office, effectively cutting off the screeching. Gordon’s mood had deteriorated as the day had worn on. He’d gone from sending back the crab salad to the kitchen because the plate wasn’t chilled to dumping a box of government pens in the trash because they were the wrong shade of blue.

“Was there a break in the police investigation of the terrorist attack?” Connie asked as he put down his growing San Jeronimo folder.

“Damn right. It wasn’t terrorists at all.”

“Really?” Connie couldn’t keep the astonishment out of her voice as she swiveled to face him. She was thoroughly familiar with the terrorist modus operandi. This had matched up on almost all counts.

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look that way,” Gordon informed her.

“Who?”

“The police have discovered it was drug-related. The bomb was intended to assassinate Juan Inurria, a local underworld kingpin who was trying to extend the boundaries of his territory and apparently stepped on someone else’s toes. Incidentally, he wasn’t killed. But he’s in hiding—supposedly on the Costa del Sol.”

Connie thought for a moment. “I hate to even ask, but are you sure there’s no possibility that either one of our men could have been involved?”

From the way Gordon tensed, she knew she’d hit a nerve. Maybe this very question was what had been bothering him all morning.

“Not the Raven, certainly,” he said quickly. “Since he hasn’t touched our money, I can’t imagine his going after dirty cash.”

“And Dan?”

A weary look crossed the veteran spymaster’s craggy features. “Connie, I pride myself on being a good judge of character, but there’s some angle to this that I just can’t figure out yet. I don’t want to think Dan had branched out from intelligence work to underworld activities. But right now I just can’t be sure.”

Connie had seldom seen her employer so distressed, but she knew the only comfort she could give him was to be as businesslike as possible. “So what sources of information are you tapping?” she asked.

“Well, there’s the report Cal Dixon made to the Director of Central Intelligence in Langley last night. He seems to have good connections with the Madrid police department, and that’s to our benefit, since we’re on the hidden drop list for all his communications.”

“Then why do I detect a note of reservation in your voice?”

“I’ve never met Dixon, but I have a gut feeling about him that makes me uneasy. The man’s ambitious, maybe too ambitious. And he has the potential for screwing up this whole delicate operation.”

“Couldn’t we just tell him what’s going on?”

“Negative. If the Kremlin gets even the smallest hint that
anyone
in the U.S. intelligence community knows about Topaz, our source of information is going to be cut off as effectively as a guillotined head.”

Connie shuddered at the graphic image, picturing the Raven’s neck under the guillotine blade.

The Falcon broke into her thoughts. “You’ll want to look at Dixon’s report yourself,” he said. “Whatever else you can say about the man, he’s surfaced a number of interesting possibilities.”

Connie picked up a pencil and notepad.

“It’s not there in so many words, but I think Dixon suspects that the Russians are somehow tied to the drug angle.”

“I’ll get our other sources working on that,” his assistant promised.

“Thanks. And pull Dixon’s personnel file. I want to know everything about the man, including how he thinks. It’s just a hunch, but I’m beginning to suspect that Dixon is holding something back from the DCI.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I think he wants to pull off some sort of grand coup.”

Connie tapped her pencil on the desk. That kind of grandstanding had gotten more than one agent killed. She hoped that in this case the Falcon’s hunch was wrong. “Are there any other leads you want me to follow up?” she asked.

“Maybe you can find out why that hole at the Prado is empty every time we send somebody to check it out, and see what you can discover about a KGB agent named Yuri Hramov.”

His assistant’s hand froze in the act of jotting down the Falcon’s request. “Hramov! How does that beast figure in this?”

“So you know of him?”

Connie shuddered. “Only by reputation. Doesn’t the KGB use him when they want to make a victim into an object lesson?”

Gordon nodded. “Yes. He’s also an expert in faking accidents, and he was spotted at the airport in Madrid. I have a feeling that Bogolubov brought him in to replace Ivanov.”

Well, Connie thought, so there was ample reason for the Falcon’s black mood. There were already so many disturbing twists and turns in this damn case that she felt like a boatman lost in a swamp. And if she and Gordon couldn’t find their way out, the whole U.S. defense effort might sink with them.

* * *

C
AL
D
IXON
had his expression back under control, but when Julie had come in to report Rozonov’s call, she’d seen the surge of excitement in his hazel eyes.

“You should have reported to me as soon as he hung up last night.”

“It was pretty late.” Julie didn’t tell Cal, but she needed time to think and distance herself from the phone call before talking to him.

“Tell me about it,” he demanded.

Dutifully she began to recount the conversation, carefully omitting the personal byplay between herself and the Russian. She’d spent much of the sleepless night planning what she was going to say this morning. That is, when she wasn’t analyzing her conversation with Aleksei for the sexual awareness that had simmered beneath the words.

Cal rubbed his hands together. “Pretty clever of the bastard not to name the restaurant. But I have a few tricks up my sleeve that will fix his wagon. If we can’t bug the place ahead of time, we’ll wire you for sound and get every syllable that comes out of his mouth on tape.”

“No!” The word was out of Julie’s mouth before she had time to think. Damn! But Cal’s enthusiasm for spy hunting made her edgy. She’d intended to play it cool during this interview, and here she was losing her composure when they’d barely gotten started.

“Listen, Julie, I can understand your concern, but I’ve had years of experience in this kind of operation.” His smooth voice let her know that his only concern about her was whether she’d mess up his plans.

“And I’ve had years of experience with Julie McLean.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?’

“I don’t even feel comfortable talking to a telephone-answering machine. I know I’d give it away if I were wired.”

Cal leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the desk. “That’s going to make it a lot harder to protect you. What if he pulls you into a waiting KGB car and goes off to who knows where? There are ways to force anyone—especially defenseless women—to talk.”

She knew the intimidating words were exaggerated. If Rozonov wanted to stuff her into a car, he could do it when she walked out the door of her apartment house. Nevertheless, the threat had the desired effect. She felt goose bumps rise up on the skin of her arms. “Cal, I don’t know
anything.
What’s he going to get out of me?”

“Julie, that’s what they all say, whether they know anything or not. Even if you swear on Lenin’s grave, do you really think he’d believe you right away? And when he finally finds out it’s true, that would be even worse. If he thinks you’re expendable, he might just eliminate you.”

Julie took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Quit scaring me. I agreed to help you, but you’re going to have to let me do it my way.”

Cal studied her set features, noting the look of determination in her dark eyes. On that little stroll in Retiro Park he’d made her think she had no choice about cooperating. Now if he gave her the illusion of some control over the situation, she might be a little easier to handle. “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” he said.

“Then I want to get one more thing straight before we continue this discussion.”

“Yes?”

“You know that my tour is up in six weeks. I’m not extending it even a day to continue in the spy business.”

Getting out of the “spy business,” as Julie called it, was not something easily done. But explaining that wasn’t going to help him achieve his present purpose. “All right.”

She seemed to visibly relax.

“So let’s get down to work.” Cal opened a thick folder that had been sitting in the middle of his desk and began to thumb through it. “We need to spend the day prepping you on what to say and how to behave.”

The thought flitted through her mind that she’d almost rather be spending the day in Rozonov’s company than in Cal’s. That she was identifying more with the Russian than with her own countryman was unsettling. She knew she had to get a grip on herself. The better she got to know Cal, the less she liked him, but that was irrelevant. The advice he was going to give her might keep her from ending up like Dan.

For the next two hours she was a very attentive pupil as Cal gave her a crash course in the basics of undercover intelligence work.

* * *

T
HE
R
USSIAN HAD PICKED
a well-traveled part of the city. Julie watched the midday traffic speed by as she waited for the light on Serrano to change. The Puerta de Alcala was located in a small
parque
where two major streets intersected. Carefully tended flower beds surrounded the limestone and granite triumphal arch that seemed to shimmer in the early afternoon heat.

There was no place to park on the busy avenues that flanked the arch. Anybody who wanted to observe a rendezvous here would have to station himself in a nearby building and bring along a telescope.

Julie shaded her eyes and looked up at the Ionic columns supporting the cornice at the top of the monument. Guarding it were several groups of warrior angels. Angels with swords and shields had always struck her as a contradiction in terms. But they seemed to appeal to something in the Spanish character.

Though the angels were visible, the man she had come to meet was nowhere in sight. Had second thoughts made him decide to cancel the appointment? Or was he late?

The light changed and Julie crossed the avenue to the arch. The day was clear and bright, with none of the smog that sometimes hung over Madrid. It was too beautiful an afternoon for espionage. That was an activity better shrouded in mist and fog.

The thought made her heart start to hammer against her ribs. For most of the morning she’d kept a lid on her emotions by doggedly working on the material for the NATO meeting that had been receiving so little of her attention lately. In actuality, much of her regular workload had gotten short shrift during the past couple of weeks because both Cal and the ongoing investigation of the San Jeronimo attack had been taking up so much of her time. Fitz had been understanding about not pressing her to meet the usual deadlines. But she didn’t feel comfortable about having him shift her assignments to other already overburdened staffers. What’s more, Cal had blandly advised that she keep things at the office as normal as possible. So she’d even agreed to a leisurely lunch with Paula early in the week, although keeping her mind on friendly chatter had taken considerable effort.

As she stepped up onto the curb, she wondered how she’d been able to concentrate at all on something so removed from this afternoon’s appointment. Pausing by a bed of yellow and orange marigolds, she forced herself to take several deep breaths before threading her way through the flower beds toward the monument.